My pushups app held me hostage, so I made a new one.

You put the phone on the floor and each time you tap it with your nose it increments the count.

They keep track of your current progression, and steadily increment the difficulty of sets.

Most are festooned in comically obtrusive ads.

Others, ludicrously, want you to pay a recurring subscription fee.

The one I found had premium subscription-only features, but they were all things I didn't need, like being able to switch to a different level in the progression.

That was such an aggressive progression that it would have been physically impossible with my current level of strength.

So I went to swap the progression back to where I should be… and it told me I needed to become a subscriber.

It seemed to mock me: "what are you going to do, lose your workout progress?"

My immediate reaction was a boiling rage.

Then I spent a couple of hours this week adding more features and polish.

It's at https://floored.fitness, and will soon be in the App Store.

My idealistic hope is that this little act of protest will use the power of vibe-coding to forcibly de-enshittify a niche category of software, collapsing the business model of these scammers.

The more state you store in a given software's silo, the more power it holds over you.

It can extract significant rent on your inability to leave, even holding you hostage.

The pushup app holding is just a particularly egregious example.

But it exists everywhere.